Since I'm probably going to make my US Since 1865 diaries a Friday afternoon series, beginning next week, here's something to whet your appetite: a session of Congress that actually DID stuff at the beginning of the Civil War. As you will remember, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the carnage that produced in Kansas, in the halls of Congress, and in the rearrangement of our political party system, very little was accomplished in the way of legislative activity before South Carolina seceded and even less between then and the events at Fort Sumter. The NEXT session of Congress, however, did quite a bit to create the country we live in now.
All will be revealed (not that you haven't already figured out why) below the Great Orange Gavel Rest. I'm writing with a heavy heart, but I keep my promises.
Consider what would happen in today's Congress if the representatives from the eleven states that made up the Confederacy just don't show up for the second session in this Congress in January, 2014. Sure, we'd still have Steve King and Michele Bachmann and Mike Lee, but we would be left with significant Democratic majorities in each house. That's what the Congressmen and Senators who convened for the second session of the 37th Congress, 1861-1862, which began on December 2, 1861, found: a significant Republican majority (although those Republicans aren't remotely like the ones we have now). Three Southern Congressmen and Andrew Johnson stayed in Congress even though their states had seceded, and Congress, without the people who had refused to admit Kansas as anything but a slave state, enacted some Whig-Republican measures left over from Henry Clay's American System that created several governmental institutions we still depend on today. Full details, and a shot at New York Magazine for calling the 37th Congress the worst ever for not preventing the Civil War, here.
First up, in order to fund the war, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 1862, which authorized the issue of $150 million in “United States notes” without any reserve or specie basis, as a temporary measure during wartime February 20, 1862. The notes, which were printed in green ink, soon were called "greenbacks" because they has no backing except the ink. These notes would become our first national currency at the end of the Civil War, and if you're over 40, you probably remember when the only color on our paper money was green.
Next, Congress set the rules for postwar agricultural expansion by passing the Homestead Act of 1862 on May 20. This act provided 160 acres of free land to any settler who paid a small filing fee and resided on and improved the land for five years; if after six months of residency the settler wanted to buy the land for $1.25/acre, he or she could do so. Between 1862 and 1890 approximately 2 million people settled on the 372,000 farms claimed through the act.
With the expansion of agriculture still on their minds, Congress created the Department of Agriculture in the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, July 2 (That's Justin Morrill, R-VT on the left). This act also granted 30,000 acres of public land to every congressman or senator (meaning even the smallest state would set aside 90,000 acres for a university)for the promotion of higher education in agriculture and the mechanic arts. Expansions were made to the list in 1890 with a second Morrill Act to add historically Black colleges in states that had segregated education and in 1994 to add Native American institutions under the Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization Act. In my search for a list I could link to, I found a lot of lists that provided the Morrill and Hatch Act (which provided funds to the land grant colleges to fund agricultural experiment stations) schools, but added the Indian schools as a footnote, and that just won't do here, so
here's a PDF file from the United States Department of Agriculture that you'll probably have to enlarge to read it. The list doesn't explain a couple of things, like Cornell and MIT, but it puts all of the universities and colleges on an equal footing.
Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 1866
Morrill Hall (The Nebraska State Museum), University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Morrill Hall, Iowa State University, 1891
Since the first Morrill Hall I'm showing you is from my alma mater, I should note that Cornell when I went there had seven undergraduate colleges: four private (Arts [where my degree is from], Engineering, Architecture and Hotel Administration) and three divisions of the State University of New York (Agriculture, Human Ecology and Industrial and Labor Relations). The Morrill Act funded the College of Agriculture. Maybe someone who went to MIT can explain its connection to the act!
Although the northern economy was more adaptable than the southern economy to demands of war, the Union still had some financial difficulties. Beside the Legal Tender Act, Congress created the first federal income tax in American history in August, 1861 as a wartime measure to get around the Constitutional prohibition of such a tax. The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 expanded on the income tax to add sin taxes on liquor, tobacco and playing cards, luxury taxes on carriages, yachts, jewelry, license taxes on almost every profession except the clergy, a tax on the dividends insurance companies paid to investors, and an inheritance tax. Both of these were repealed at the end of the war, but they set the pattern for the way the government would eventually be funded.
This congress also outlawed slavery in the District of Columbia, which paved the way for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
Finally, Congress admitted Kansas as a free state January 29, 1861. Kansas would have the highest rate of casualties of any state in the Union). Congress also accepted a statehood petition from the 50 counties of Virginia that came under Union occupation, about 4% of whose population was slaves, and passed a bill requiring emancipation to be a condition of statehood. West Virginia came into the Union June 20, 1863, with a constitution that freed slaves born after July 4, 1863 and all others on their 25th birthday.
The new America of big business, heavy industry and capital-intensive agriculture that emerged after the war (as the end of the war ushered in the Gilded Age) probably would have emerged if the war hadn’t happened, but the war molded the particular configuration of society that emerged from the war. Outrages from west of the Mississippi next week.